I have been known, now and again, to fret over the moral condition of our contemporary world. On such occasions, it warms my heart to think of the brave warriors of culture who are quick to defend precious institutions against the relativising onslaughts of modernity. Two recent cases in point:
- Sixty-six Senators (out of a hundred, for you public-high-school graduates like myself) voted to amend the Constitution to stop our Flag from being burned! Now, it’s true that sixty-seven (“more than two-thirds,” ibid.) would have been required to actually scoot the proposed amendment along its way, but still it’s comforting to know that such a robust majority wants to do the right thing. After all, flag burning is up 33% this year! The amendment was a straightforward prohibition against “the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” Desecration, of course, means “to violate the sacredness of,” and sacred means “dedicated to or set apart for the worship of a deity” or “worthy of religious veneration,” which is a status I didn’t even know belonged to Old Glory. Always learning something new, I guess.
- One Pope (that’s all there is) came out firmly against guitars in church! Because Jesus (or perhaps it is the Holy Spirit, I’m a little vague on the details) approves of chanting and organ music, but finds string instruments to be annoyingly twangy. This bold gesture fits in well with Benedict XVI’s shrewd plan to revitalize Christianity in affluent, secular cultures, where guitar music has traditionally met great resistance.
I’m not sure which of these stirring tales brings greater joy to my bitter, cynical soul. But it’s good to know that, now that we’ve successfully dealt with poverty, disease, and war, the important battles over appropriate behavior are being fought with clarity and vigor.
This thread and a good part of human history testify to the fascination that people have with divinity, but none of the obsession gets us any closer to defining or even identifying the object of this obsession. I think the real commonality here is the human propensity to look for an agent operating behind events, a tendency whose adaptive value has often been pointed out. From the zebra’s point of view, it’s better to assume that the noise in the bushes may be a lion. That sort of programmatic paranoia is all very well, but it does tend to fill the world up with imaginary beings like Gods and Demons.
I think evil is as much a superstition as God, but that has nothing to do with endorsing the holocaust. The real question, from my point of view, is whether people are willing to put their lives on the line to prevent events like the holocaust, not whether they are willing to pronounce a magic anathema on it in the comments section.
Why do you think a rule is groundless if there is no supernatural authority for it? I mean you don’t seem to argue to the proposition that such an authority is necessary. You argue from it. I don’t. Of course I’m not looking for quite so transcendent a standard as you are. I expect ethics to be a pretty humdrum subject with few surprises. It’s about how people should live together. It isn’t cosmic.
I have no trouble defining morality. And while it comes from Jewish tradition, it has nothing to do with a god. The story goes that when some smart-aleck guy asked Hillel to teach him the entire Torah while standing on one foot, he responded “what is hateful to you, don’t do to your neighbor. That is the whole of the Torah; the rest is commentary.” I would alter that somewhat, to “what is hateful to your neigbor, try not to do to your neighbor…” (sometimes called the “platinum rule). The rest is commentary. And food for a lot of debate.
That is a good rule, Ruth, although as a summary of the Torah I think it is very selective. What I am asking, though, is whether there is a reason why someone who doesn’t happen to like your rule should respect it anyway? Can you give this reason?
Jim, do you ever object to the behavior of anyone? If so, is it because of anything other than superstition, in your mind?
That is a good rule, Ruth, although as a summary of the Torah I think it is very selective. At any rate, what I am asking is whether there is a reason why someone who doesn’t happen to like your rule should respect it anyway? Can you give this reason?
Jim, do you ever object to the behavior of anyone? If so, is it because of anything other than superstition, in your mind? Doesn’t a person who dies fighting against tyranny do so only if that person thinks tyranny is evil (or wrong, if you like that word better)? So that person has died for the sake of a superstition, in your opinion?
“It’s about how people should live together. It isn’t cosmic,” you say. Well, some large groups of people have believed that the way people should live together is under religious dictatorships, or by making genocidal war on their neighbors, or by performing systematic cliterectomies on their young women. But then, that is their preference, and who are we to deny the rightness of it?
Once again: can you say why we should reject things like these?
As Humpty Dumpty would say, Shane asks tremendously easy riddles. There are all sorts of cogent, non-theological reasons to oppose tyranny and genocide. I can’t believe that anybody reading this paragraph would have any problem coming up with scads of ’em. There is vastly more evidence for the plain wrongness of certain acts than for the existence of any deity.
The irrationalist version of religious ethics leaves people with the impression that the only reason they ought not resort to violence and chicanery is divine fiat. But what happens when people who buy into this view lose their faith? What keeps them from murdering us in our beds if murder was only wrong because God said it was? To judge from the track record of religious sects, this is not merely a theoretical worry.
“As Humpty Dumpty would say, Shane asks tremendously easy riddles. There are all sorts of cogent, non-theological reasons to oppose tyranny and genocide.”
Go ahead, tell us.
If I were to lose my faith, I guess there are two reasons why I wouldn’t murder anyone:
1. I, myself, wouldn’t want to be killed by someone because I value my life and there are lots of things I want to accomplish. So I wouldn’t even consider doing that to someone else, inflicting any sort of pain on them unless I had to (i.e. out of self defense). But if there is no objective morality, who cares what I think. If you want to go ahead and kill someone and you feel completely okay about it, it’s your call.
2. If I were to get caught, I would have to go through a lot of crap. It ain’t worth it.
I don’t know about you, Vince, but I actually don’t want to kill anyone, even though God does not exist. Nor do any of my atheist friends. Nor do most people in society. So we get together and pass laws that work to punish people when they do start killing.
That’s just the way the real world works — people have moral preferences, which they attempt to think through and systematize into a coherent set of beliefs, and then negotiate with other members of society to develop those preferences into an agreeable set of laws, leaving reasonable room for the fact that not everyone has the same preferences. (So we have laws against killing humans, but not laws against eating cows.) People who want to claim that morality can’t exist without God choose to ignore the empirical fact that it does.
Perhaps not now, Sean, but what about right after you learn that some guy has just raped, tortured, and mutilated your ten-year-old daughter? [Substitute your favorite significant other.]
There’s no point in rehashing this again. One view is right, one wrong. Either
A) Religion has a negligible net effect in inhibiting savage impulses. So we’re better off without it, because it’s factually wrong.
or
B) Religion has a significant net effect in inhibiting savage impulses. So we’re better off with it, despite its being factually wrong.
Just attempting to clarify.
Your fellow atheist in Christ,
B.
P.S. That you don’t want to kill anyone — given that men currently live who enslave, torture, and starve millions of human beings — is rather disquieting.
Or,
C) Christianity is factually correct, and so we’re better off with it. 🙂
I guess this really is a kindergarden class, and you have to spell everything out:
Murdering people is a bad idea because a world in which people murder freely would be a lousy place to live. Even if an individual absolutely, positively knows that he can get away with murder, he would diminish yourself by abusing the dignity of a being like himself–there is an element of suicide in murder. Sane and healthy individuals feel revulsion at the thought of “murder most foul,” but they also have reasons to reject such behavior that transcend emotions.
Conservatives, so it seems, are always looking for reasons to kill somebody. That’s why they have to demonize their enemies. James Bond’s license to kill is only justifiable because of SPECTRE, an organization dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of evil. A similar logic seems to underlie the typical right-wing belief that most or all people are only restrained from running amok by draconic punishments and the fear of hellfire. If you favor authoritarian governments and primitive religiosity anyhow, it’s a wonderful excuse.
People aren’t angels, and nobody is born with the ability to make rational moral decisions. Some people do have to be restrained by punishment, and everybody has to be trained before they can be educated. Similarly, it is sometimes right and necessary to oppose dangerous and crazy states with deadly force. On the other hand, we ought to be very suspicious of people who are just itching for an excuse to hurt people under color of authority.
“I guess this really is a kindergarden class, and you have to spell everything out”
That’s ‘kindergarten’. 🙂
You all seem to be advocating for an idea of morality without God. I have come to believe that the argument you are making — that there is a non-arbitrary way to order one’s actions without reference to any absolute moral principle — is impossible.
Shorter Shane:
1. Monotheistic religions, particularly Christianity, that advocate the oppression of a class of beings (women) are moral.
2. If an atheist is one who does not believe in God or gods, and atheists cannot have morals, then Buddhism, Taoism, and religious philosophies like them without a specific God, are amoral. Or impossible.
Likewise, since anything before theism rendered us all immoral, then we aren’t really here, because as beings without God, and therefore lacking a moral code, our ancestors all killed each other. Animals, too, don’t really exist, since they can’t understand God either, and as soon as they spring into being, lacking a moral system, they just kill each other.
How about this perspective instead: Hitler and Stalin outlawed religion because it competed with them in terms of absolute authority, not because they didn’t believe in God. In fact, I propose they did believe in God, and they didn’t like the competition. Goebbels himself likened Nazism to a “faith.” I’ve never heard of any “philosophy and scripture” of atheism attributed to Hitler. Rather, it’s the conservative tendency to provoke a gut reaction, instead of posing a rational argument, that leads them to assign Hitler labels to anything they dislike, and therefore blames Nazism and Communism on atheism.
With regard to the Bible and its contradictions, can it really be said that Christianity is a non-arbitrary system?
Of course, it’s Shane’s *belief* that is the basis of argument, so nobody can really gainsay it. If there were evidence that lack of belief in God predisposes one to immorality, and belief in God transforms one into a saint, then it’d be different, and one might actually be tempted to take the argument seriously.
“1. Monotheistic religions, particularly Christianity, that advocate the oppression of a class of beings (women) are moral.”
Women are not oppressed in Christianity. They’re just not allowed to become priests.
“2. If an atheist is one who does not believe in God or gods, and atheists cannot have morals, then Buddhism, Taoism, and religious philosophies like them without a specific God, are amoral. Or impossible.”
Athiests can have morals. That’s what Shane is saying. But she’s saying that athiests can’t rationally base their morals on athiesm itself.
“Likewise, since anything before theism rendered us all immoral, then we aren’t really here, because as beings without God, and therefore lacking a moral code, our ancestors all killed each other. Animals, too, don’t really exist, since they can’t understand God either, and as soon as they spring into being, lacking a moral system, they just kill each other.”
Totally illogical. What are you talking about? It’s not like we were immoral before theism. Shane’s just saying atheists can’t use atheism to support their morals.
I don’t know if I agree with that completely, but that’s what Shane is saying.
I’m not sure why anybody would think that morality is built on atheism, whatever that would mean. Presumably people who don’t believe in God justify their morality by appeal to reason and experience. What’s the absence of God got to do with it?
“I’m not sure why anybody would think that morality is built on atheism, whatever that would mean. Presumably people who don’t believe in God justify their morality by appeal to reason and experience.”
My opinion is that, ultimately, morality must be based on reason. For a Christian, as an example, it is sufficient for Jesus to have said that X is morally wrong, but one must ultimately be able to use reason to show that X is in fact morally wrong.
So I guess the question is, when you begin your reasoning about what is and what is not morally wrong, what premises are you holding? Must you hold certain premises in order to have a “self-consistent” (not sure what I mean by this word 🙂 ) morality? Can you have premises which are compatible with atheism? Or, in order to justify your morality, must you base your reasoning on tenets of theism?
(Also, I think that since we are all of the same human nature, what is a morally wrong action should be morally wrong for everybody.)
Historically, many, if not most, theistic philosophers have maintained that morality is something we can know rationally. They may believe that there are mysteries of the faith that can only be learned or validated by revelation, but ordinary ethical rules aren’t like the Trinity or the creation of everything from nothing. Non-Christian philosophers like Aristotle had an analogous opinion. Ethics grows out of human interactions. It is anything but highfallutin and its mostly unremarkable rules don’t have to be proved from axioms like geometrical theorems. We have binding obligations to one another whether or not we happen to believe in God.
Why do we have binding obligations to one another?
Sean said…People who want to claim that morality can’t exist without God choose to ignore the empirical fact that it does.
And Sean has empirically proven that there is no God. He’s on the outside looking in, unlike the rest of us on the inside looking out.
It’s his miniature particle accelerator test tube experiment where he adds some of this and adds a little of that and smashes one or two particles together too, and when God doesn’t show up in the mix, he knows that God doesn’t exist.
Again, it’s as Dostoevsky said in so many words in The Brother’s Karamozov, if there is no God all things are lawful. If so, it’s a free for all. If so, it’s survival of the fittest. That is the logical conclusion all you logicons. At least Nietze took atheism to its logical conclusion.
But maybe, what Sean really meant is that morality can exist apart from a belief in God.
But no no no because emphatically he states:
I don’t know about you, Vince, but I actually don’t want to kill anyone, even though God does not exist.
Why does he know God doesn’t exist? Because he has the miniature little particle accelerator test tube to prove it.
Dostoevsky had it exactly backwards. If God is dead, nothing is permitted, there being, after all, nobody licensed to do any permitting. For the record, that was also Nietzsche’s opinion. He thought that the consequence of the death of God would probably be the Last Man, i.e. an apathetic, essentially passive creature.
Note that “God” in this context doesn’t refer to some purported metaphysical entity but to an ultimate value that retains credibility. In this respect, it isn’t quite right to blame atheism for the excesses of Lenin and Stalin since God wasn’t dead for them in this sense. They or at least their followers were certainly true believers even if their deity was Dialectical Materialism instead of God Allmighty. Really great crimes require faith, which, come to think of it, is a proposition that could be converted into a defense of religion.
Hi.
Why do we have binding obligations to one another?
Back in the day, there was a pest who followed around after Descartes and kept insisting, “I think, but I don’t think I am!”
Obviously one can claim not to recognize the obligations we have to other people. People who are actually unable to recognize them, however, are defective human beings who are typically fouled up in other ways as well. One finds them in prisons and the 4th edition of the DSM. I don’t think too many of us would choose to be crazy in this fashion.
If I point out that taking off all your clothes and jumping in a cactus patch is likely to result in intense pain, you are perfectly at liberty to insist that my argument is highly arbitrary since it assumes that it is a bad thing to suffer. Well, explanations have an end, as Wittgenstein used to point out. If you want to jump in that cactus patch, be my guest.
Hey, how’s it going?
So why do we have binding obligations to one another?
“Obviously one can claim not to recognize the obligations we have to other people. People who are actually unable to recognize them, however, are defective human beings who are typically fouled up in other ways as well.”
Why are they defective human beings? What does it mean to be a defective human being? What is such a human being lacking? I thought humans are just a collection of cells working together. Or a collection of atoms, if you will. A huge collection without any free will. We’re purely material beings following the laws of physics. What’s “defective” about that?
“If I point out that taking off all your clothes and jumping in a cactus patch is likely to result in intense pain, you are perfectly at liberty to insist that my argument is highly arbitrary since it assumes that it is a bad thing to suffer.”
What is your argument? Personally, I choose not to take off all my clothes and jump onto a cactus because that’s too painful and there’s absolutely no benefit in doing such a thing. So what? What are you trying to argue here? There are lots of people of choose to inflict a bit of suffering on themselves for some benefit which is greater than the pain they experience.
Folks who are looking for some sort of absolute morality are probably doomed to disappointment since even postulating the existence of God really doesn’t help. “Why those ten, Yahweh?” On the other hand, if, like me, you figure that it’s enough that there are cogent, though hardly cosmic arguments, in favor of acting well, what’s the shouting about? It is written in the Bible that the heathen rage in vain. Apparently it isn’t just the heathen.
You might try asking yourself the metaquestion. What would I count as an answer to the question, “Why should I act well?” If you’re not going to accept the homely sorts of reasons that I’ve suggested, just what kind of answers would suit you?
I guess you don’t have an answer for my previous comment, then. Very well.
“Folks who are looking for some sort of absolute morality are probably doomed to disappointment since even postulating the existence of God really doesn’t help.”
So, you’re saying that no such absolute morality exists? If that is correct, then why do you claim that we must “act well”. Why should I act well? Perhaps to preserve society? Why should we work to preserve society, or preserve the earth, or preserve anything at all? What’s so good about human life and society anyway? I mean, do humans have intrinsic worth or something? But we’re just made of atoms. You’ve suggested “homely sorts of reasons”, but I’m not exactly sure of what they are or where they are exactly. Maybe I’m demanding too much precision or explicit exposition. I’m sorry.
Since we’re all human, then whatever constitutes “acting well” must apply to all humans, no? If so, there should be some sort of absolute morality, right? Isn’t the demand to “act well” an absolute truth?
“On the other hand, if, like me, you figure that it’s enough that there are cogent, though hardly cosmic arguments, in favor of acting well, what’s the shouting about?”
Can you remind me what these arguments are, please? I’m not sure if you listed them out for us. Thank you.
Don’t forget my previous comment, my friend. 🙂
Have a great day!